


Relics aren't only from Saints

by almina



Category: Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 15:12:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10389585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almina/pseuds/almina
Summary: Desmond Doss had a hold on the men he rescued.





	

It drove me crazy, when people first had computers, I mean everyone got one, like everyone had a phone. The kids talked about DOS, DOS, DOS, dos this, dos that and just that word sets off memories of those days in the Pacific War, of Desmond Doss. He haunts me still. Whenever my attention is not fixed on something, my thoughts turn to him.

Doss, the bullied one, the scapegoat, there’s always one in a group. Especially in a group of scared, young testosterone filled fools. I did not have much affinity for my fellow soldiers, and it diminished every time they picked on Doss. Called him a fag, a pansy, because he did not share in their blood lust. 

I watched his face as they reviled him. I don’t think he knew what they were talking about when they made their filthy suggestions. But he put it together, quickly enough.

Make all the jokes you like about mountain boys and what they do with their pigs or their sisters, those guys can mix it up. They don’t make good punching bags. Yeah, I know about fighting. I enlisted to avoid arrest. But Doss passed up opportunities to answer their attacks. He could have rearranged their orthodontia. I kind of wished he would, instead of taking it, suppressing the rage. 

I touched him once, after he had been wounded, a break in his skin that would not even count as a wound that first operation on Maeda Escarpment, the skin on his back just below the left shoulderblade had been shrapneled. Anyway the skin opened, and the cut was deep enough to clot over dirt and others’ blood, a site for fierce infection. The ooze had dried, and the smell told me that infection was taking hold. It was not bad enough for him to be taken to surgery for debridement of the wound. Of course, Desmond being Desmond, he would not want to take surgeons’ attention from other patients in immediate danger. 

Actually I had been in flesh to flesh contact with him twice, first time on the first attempt to take Hacksaw Ridge. He had found me when I had been shot just below my knee. Nothing but shrapnel and wood splinters found at surgery but I was bleeding like a pig, already dizzy, with my field of vision contracting, thirsty to the point of madness. That happens when people bleed out. I could see how my body would die as my spirit departed. I would try to pull myself upright on the shot to hell tree by the hole where I took refuge between two dead bodies. one Japanese, one from my unit, B company. I expected the next living face I saw would be Japanese, and that I would be beheaded or bayonet filleted. Perhaps it would be a stay behind American doing clean up with a flamethrower. I did not want to die but now the moment was upon me and I wanted only to get it over with. Fear had shorted me out, overloaded my circuitry. I had already let life go. 

Doss saved my life with a tourniquet, better than the one I tried to improvise. Unlike mine, his worked, actually stopping the spurting like turning off a spigot. As my great grandkids say, it is ‘supreme weirdness’ to see your own bone, blue white and glistening. It never occured to me that bone could hurt. But it did by the time Desmond found me. Still, exposed and splintered bone was the least of my problems. When you are down, unable to fight or to run, and the enemy wishes to kill giving pain in the process, you feel a new species of fear. It is not like when the neighborhood thug is about to teach you a lesson It is not like your car is sliding on black ice at 40 mph toward a pylon. I’ve been there, felt that. Your mouth goes cold, you react with animal strength and reflexes. What I felt that day on Hacksaw was dying interrupted, spirit nearly escaped to the next world. A Japanese soldier would be along any moment to formalize it. I have never felt such fear. It is pain. It is madness. I would have done or said anything to end it. When I saw Doss low running toward my hiding place, my fondest hope was that I could flag him down and have him shoot me. It wouldn’t actually be killing me but simply hurrying me on my way. Then he landed on both feet beside me, carefully, I should say respectfully, avoiding stepping on the dead. He looked at my leg, and at the pathetic tourniquet I had fashioned with a boot lace. He had the morphine out, ah beautiful man, he was going to make it easier for me. I still could not stand on my legs. Neither of them would work right, though the injury did not look that bad to me. How could it slow me down? 

“You’ve lost a terrible lot of blood.” My uniform uniform leg tucked into my boot ballooned out and slopped with blood. My uniform was red now, the squishy mud under my feet was red too.

“Thank you, you’ve let me die easy,” 

“No, no, no, I’m not letting you die.” That soft West Virginia accent could make a scolding sound like a love coo. He put his canteen to my mouth. I drank it dry and felt as if I had some of my blood back in my veins where it should be. “You’re going home,” he said. 

He put an arm around my chest under my arms and I was standing. He was skinny, but godawful wiry strong. He was climbing out of the hole and I was going with him trying to use my legs, trying not to put much weight on him. I just had to tell him as if he didn't know, that the gunfire would resume any moment and we would be dead. 

“Let me go. Run. I don’t want your death on my conscience,”I said keeping my voice down so the Japanese could not zero in on us.

But Desmond had this weird confidence about him. Maybe I should say arrogance. Not that he ever did anything that said I'm-holier–than-thou, I- am- God’s- special- pet, but sure as the mathematics I taught for forty years, I would have been dead, stiffening, fly blown meat if not for Desmond. We were moving toward the cliff with bullets kicking up mud around us, or thwacking into shot up trees. Fate,or God or the angels or luck spared Doss. And as long as I was with him I would be spared, my death put off for another day. Two bowline-like knots around me, and he used a tree as a hoist block and let me down, quick enough that I felt fear again, but just a pale fear, a carny ride scare. I had only to remember who was paying out the rope at the top of that escarpment and the fear was gone. Just like that. He was letting me down quickly because he wanted to go back for more lost souls. I had rejoined the living. I learned that woozy, dizzy, darkened vision sensation was only because I had lost so much blood.

“Easy thing to fix, but I’ve seen people die after they lost less than you have,” the medic said as he cut off my uniform in preparation for surgery. “You had no blood pressure when you got here.”

The leg was something else. That wound was cleaned and sewn up within hours. Two more liters of plasma and the doc judged that I would be capable of fighting within days. The skin healed quickly but the leg still troubles me, even now in my nineties. Osteomyelitis. A few years after the war, antibiotics helped for a while, then, I am told the germs became resistant and spread further into the bone, dug in like the Japanese on Hacksaw. 

Fate granted me another sight of Doss. Everyone was turning to look at him those days. He had performed a miracle up on Hacksaw Ridge, saving dozens of wounded men. I was one of them. All along, I refused medication for pain. I didn’t want anything to dull my senses now that I was alive again. Alive! After I had enough fluid in my veins to bring my blood pressure up to normal I made myself useful, helping the wounded until I returned to combatant status. I saw Doss around the hospital tent. There would not be another run at Hacksaw Ridge just yet. But for a while, for a too short interval we rested. I still limped at the second assault on Hacksaw but the Army had grown a lot less fussy about bodily perfection of men it sent into battle to be maimed and killed. In the barracks tent, second night, Doss had blood oozing onto the back of his shirt. Someone mentioned the growing red splotch on his back and offered to help him to the hospital tent. He shook his head no and peeled the shirt off his shoulders. Then it stuck to him. The blood had dried. He was impatient with himself and yanked it off. The dressing stuck to the wound. It had to be changed before the tissue grew around it or he’d need anaesthesia for the dressing change. 

I was tending my wound myself now, rather than asking overworked medics to do it. I drenched it in hydrogen peroxide which fizzed out the dead tissue. Then I rebandaged it. And truth to tell, I was pleased at how quickly it healed. 

I told Desmond I could unstick the gauze on his back. He need not rip it off taking newly healed tissue with it. He lay on his cot, stomach down I tucked my clean towel along his side to catch the liquid as it ran off his back. I opened the full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and dribbled a little onto his dressing and the blood that had glued his shirt to his back. It fizzed. I knew first hand that that stung. A little more and the mess had softened. I peeled it off with my fingers – yes, in case you wonder, I had washed my hands before I undertook to change his dressing. Lord knows what germs we were picking up here.

I held out the sodden gauze and showed it to him. “Infected,” he said. So he could smell it too.

“I’ll keep irrigating the wound until I don’t smell it any more,” I said. I had brought clean washcloths to his bedside, threadbare army issue, washed and bleached nearly to uselessness. I dabbed one on a small bleeder in his wound. And God only knows why, instead of throwing it into the bowl of bloody dressings, I stuffed it into my pocket. Every few years I look at it. Despite the hydrogen peroxide, the stain persists. His blood. my relic. I will be buried with it.

I can only say that something about Doss deranged me that night he snatched me back from death. For one thing, everything about him pleased me. His voice, his manner, even his single minded shutting us out while he communed with his Bible and the Almighty. 

His smell, his abstemious habits, that shock of dark hair, that smile. In the barracks I felt the curious desire to pull his bed covers up under his chin and tuck him in. I noticed other men looking at him. Were these others people he had saved and who now could not fathom their attachment to him? Did rescue do something to your mind, so that all your love and passion fasten on first person you see as you leave death’s dominion? 

Doss was wounded in that second foray on Hacksaw Ridge. He spent over five years in various hospitals recovering from his wounds and the tuberculosis he picked up in Leyte. I did not keep up with him specifically. Nowadays that would be called stalking but as I read any news story, and I read a lot, the words Desmond or Okinawa jumped out at me. When I saw the newsreel of Pres. Truman presenting him the Medal of Honor, I envied the president, yes envied him, that he clasped Desmond’s hand through the entire reading of the citation. Envying the president his contact with Desmond! Damn. Told you Doss disordered my thinking.


End file.
